Q: Your album Mammals has been in the works since 2012? Can you talk about the history of the band and what it felt like to finish the album?

A: Believe it or not, it has actually been in the works since 2008! Peter and I have been playing music together since 2005, when we were college freshmen. Jared Dancler and I met in SUNY Oneonta around 2008 through his brother, Calvin, and my roommate, Phil. He’d binge play Smash Brothers with them and afterward noticed the Portishead poster that was sitting in my room. Third had just come out, and we were both big fans of that album. I had written “Cut It Out,” “Movement,” “Head Up The Sky” and “Sink Low” around that time period, with mostly Peter and I working on those songs. Jared D asked to play my acoustic, and he was playing “Weed Crumbs In The Wind” on it and I knew immediately I wanted him in the band. Sadly, he lived in Upstate New York during that time and we were based in New York City so that was difficult. He did eventually move down to the city, so I snagged him immediately and went on to teach him all those songs which took time. You know how in Spinal Tap, they always had an issue finding a drummer? Our issue was finding a bassist. We went through people but it was never the right fit so Jared D and I would take turns on bass. We were working on our album with our dear friend, Stan Mitchell, out in Brooklyn at his studio and “D. M. Torrential” was recorded around that time which must’ve been 2011 or so. Eventually Jared D decided he had enough of New York City, so he left in 2012 or so and now resides in Portland, Oregon, and Peter and I took a break from Kamehameha. Peter has been playing with our good friend, Brendan, in a band called Eleanor so that was occupying his time and I started a trip hop project called Colordrone with my friend Dae. This was how I eventually met Jared Miller, whom I met through our friend Kris, and he played bass for Colordrone. That project took a hiatus once Dae moved out of New York, and Peter asked if I wanted to continue with Kamehameha around 2015, so we asked Jared M to join as our bassist. Since then, we wrote “Pen Caps,” “Orbit,” “Constants,” and “Mammals” together, with Jared D working from the opposite side of the country collaborating with Peter Ryan at Mad Shaman Studios in Portland. We did most of our recording in my studio and with Jared M’s friend Larry Menaker at Beacon Hill Studios in Port Washington. I also worked with strings for the first time on this album, and was fortunate to be able to work with our friends Sam and Karen who both play on “Sink Low” and “D. M. Torrential.” It was a pain in the ass putting this album together, and truth be told, it was mostly the critic in me that made this album take so long to finish. To say it’s a relief would be an understatement, but I really wanted our first album to capture the essence of our band since the beginning of when Peter and I started. I learned a great deal while producing it, and there are still so many things about it that I wish were different but you have to eventually put it out. At the end of the day, the album represents what the band has been through in the past decade together, along with the themes that can come with growing up in a world that you’re simply not prepared for.

Q: What was it like putting together songs from different sessions or eras into an album? What were the challenges?

A: Putting these songs together from different eras wasn’t too difficult but for “D. M. Torrential,” the drum part changed a little bit from the way Peter plays it now. That drum part was recorded about seven years ago… Other than that, one of biggest challenges for me was not having Jared D here for much of the recording and editing process. I think it would’ve been a very different album had he stayed here to work on it, as he would’ve been more involved vocally and on guitars. Though on a personal level, it was my first time producing and mixing a project like this, so there were many challenges with mixing this album as a whole. I was never really sure if I got it right, and did so many hearing tests from as many sources as I could. “Was the bass too low? Are the vocals too light? Can you hear the kick?” All these questions were in my head and it drove me bat shit insane, which made me panic while mixing. But I needed this push, and I really wanted to do it the way I had envisioned and heard in my head. To go with that, this is a highly personal album and essentially sums up my twenties; mostly a lot of the lows with some highs here and there. Songs are like photographs in a lot of ways. You can look at a picture and remember that exact setting and time, knowing the thoughts and emotions you felt at that time when that picture was taken… It’s similar with songs. So to record these songs, years later, knowing where these songs originated from in the first place, it took me back to these dark places that I really was trying to move on from and forget about. However, working on these songs so thoroughly, it was a solid reminder of how much better life is today than it was back then and I’ve come to really appreciate that journey that I and I’m sure, others, have been through. You eventually figure it out and become wiser from such experiences.​Q: There are a number of different styles on this album but wouldn’t call it conventional. What was the creative process like?

A: Everyone in this band has origins deeply rooted in specific types of music, and one of the biggest attributes I look for in any musician that comes into the fold is how can they fit within the whole picture in regards to what instruments they play. The rule I have in the band is to not to limit our creativity and to ditch conventional rules of what is “correct” to play. That can be really confusing to some, but it works for us. However, as a producer, you also have to be certain that it’s a cohesive album, theme, or sound, and not just a bunch of songs that are genre hopping all over the place. I was pretty stern, probably too stern, on which songs I wanted on this album and how the track list should go. It was a bit challenging for Peter and I because we had different approaches to how we wanted this album to go, but being that it was such a personal record, I wanted to convey the struggles and growth that came with growing up. Our band tends to brainstorm and jam a lot, and we work on crafting later. Sometimes I’ll have a song already written and everyone plays over it and figures out their parts. There’s complete artistic freedom in this band, maybe I’ll show Jared M a bass line here to start, but he’ll twist it into his own flavor and add his own spices to it and ditto for Peter. Sometimes they just write their parts on their own. It’s a very organic approach, and I think that trust that we have in each other comes a long way to why our band contains so many different styles within our songs. The tricky part is figuring out how to make it flow together, which I feel we were able to do on Mammals.

Q: Can you talk about some of lyrical themes that run through the album. Are there any over arching ideas?

A: As a music listener, I tend to gravitate towards letting the tone of the music set up an environment for the lyrics to rest on to better get a feel of what the themes of the words can be about. Sometimes it’s pretty straight forward, sometimes it’s very ambiguous, but you have to trust that the listener will come up with their own meanings behind the song and find their own way to relate to the lyrics. That’s part of the fun in music! Without going too into detail and giving away specifics of the lyrical themes of this album, as I mentioned before a majority of these songs come from my past and relate to struggles of growing up and not necessarily being prepared for all that life throws at you in various situations. I’m sure I’m not the only person that has felt this way. In the case of Mammals, I wanted to stick to being in situations that felt out of our control. By that I mean, it could be an instance where someone else may have brought discord onto you without you even asking, that can deeply affect you and was completely out of your control, like say, a person breaking into your home that was locked from the top to bottom. You did everything you could to try to be in control of that situation, yet, it still happened anyway. These situations can range from struggle to acceptance to heartbreak, but I wanted that to be a central theme of this album, in various types of situations that have come up in my life while also maintaining and setting up a sort of metaphoric or ambiguous approach to the wording so that it can be more relatable to others and not too personal or specific to my own experiences. Who doesn’t love music that they can relate to?

Q: Some of your ideas require more time then a single worthy pop song. Take for instance “Sink Low” which closes in on the ten-minute mark. What are your thoughts behind the use of time in a song. How do you know when to wrap things up or keep it going or make a transition?

A: That’s where our influences come into play. Peter and I, listened to post rock bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor back in the day so longer songs that took time to develop were never an issue in this band. I’m a sucker for crescendos, and for a song like “Sink Low,” I really felt it needed some strings to really push the song over to where I wanted it to be sonically. We’re so grateful to have Sam on violin and Karen on viola for that song because it was originally a shorter song, but I wanted there to be a more gradual build throughout the song to introduce this tension and convey the emotion of being told the absolute worse news imaginable without being at all prepared for it, and the sort of self destruction that can come with digesting it for the first time. I look at Mammals, the whole album, as this psychedelic trip in a way. There’s a come up, a peak, and a come down. Sometimes the peak can be overwhelming to the point of what seems like no return, where it’s complete madness, unfiltered, and uncontrollable, but you eventually get out of that head space and realize there’s a lesson to all of it. The whole album is a phase in one’s life, a transition from chapter to chapter within songs, of personal growth from failures of all types, big and small. Tonally, you can get a sense of immaturity and thirst for adventure with “Head Up The Sky,” which goes into what I feel is the emotional peak of the album in “Sink Low.” The rest of it eventually plays out, and I hope the listener comes out of it feeling surprised at how the mood changes as the album finishes up because life is really all about throwing curveballs at you that you grow from. So in regards to the time of songs or when to transition or keep going, it’s mostly about what feels right intuitively.

Q: What else do we need know about Kamehameha?

A: That our album Mammals is out now on all digital platforms! To go with that, if you’re in the New York City area, please come check out our live shows because they’re completely different experiences than our studio versions in that we have added sections and instrumentation now with our new member, Raphael, who plays keys and synths. We’re continuously trying to push ourselves musically and stir the pot in the rock genre which seems to have died down a bit. I wouldn’t say we’re your typical rock band either. We’ll probably aim to tour and play more on the West coast and along the East coast in the future, come say hi, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, Bandcamp, really, anywhere you can, and give us a listen! Our website is www.kamehamehamusic.com, and we’re always willing to chat. Thanks for reading, we hope you enjoy Mammals, and we’d love to see you on the road!